Yahoo Account Migration: The Good, Bad & Ugly

THE BAD: Take a deep breath, get a drink, and plan on spending a lot of time checking and fixing your ads. Also make sure content is off if you want it off. Here are some issues I've identified so far:

UGLY effects of the Panama transition:

I often see ads altered with titles that no longer make sense, have repeated words, or just keyword(s). All ads in your new account should be checked and many will need to be edited. If you originally had ads that were specific to your keywords you may now have one generic ad for all of them. You will have to manually improve them.

You may also see keywords that show impressions but Yahoo's system now says there is no ad for that keyword. This is because they are reviewing existing ads again and removing some. Even ads that were originally running after the transition may disappear later, resulting in no ads being displayed for searches on keywords that are important to your business.

REALLY IMPORTANT POINT: If the wording of any of your titles or ads is important to reducing clicks from unrelated searches you may need to pause those ads until you can correct them. If you do not do this your spending may increase dramatically while your conversion rate plummets. (In other words, you'll be paying for visitors that are NOT going to buy anything.)

Yahoo's new system uses Dynamic Keyword insertion. It may replace an original title of "Save on Specific Brand Specific Model" with JUST the keyword(s) the searcher used when searching. This can result in many ads for any given search having exactly the same title. I highly recommend you edit those titles with something more meaningful or your traffic and conversions will suffer.

THE GOOD: You have to find the good in every situation, right? Well, here it is. All advertisers have the same challenges. Those who are aware and edit their ads right away have the advantage. If many of the ads on a search result page only have the keyword(s) as the title it will be easy for you to create a more effective ad, get the click, and make the sale.

MORE GOOD: You can now block entire continents from seeing your ads. To do this click on the Administration tab and look for Account General Information under the Accounts sub-tab.

There is a lot that changed for the better but I still think it's a very clumsy over-complicated system. I think Google's is 100x easier to use/manage/understand.

Something I did notice missing from the new Yahoo system is that when you do Ad Group reports, you don't get average position anymore. You can only get positions by doing a keyword report. Boo.

Anything new takes a lot of getting used to and will be modified and improved. Google has made a lot of continual changes over time as will Yahoo.

They do have some functions buried too deep and I have yet to find effective ways to make the changes the transition has made necessary for optimum results.

As I find ways to do specific tasks I will write them up and post them. I encourage anyone else who wishes to do this to also share their tips and techniques. Whatever we can share will benefit us all.

I have taken the not-so unique approach of ignorance.

I have not been actively using the account recently, though, so I'm existing in a state of "whatever" on this one.

If things are fragged, meh, no biggie, I was going to have to basically start from scratch anyway, so this change won't mess me up too much anyway.

Posting around as I do, though, I'm seeing the same issues in other spaces as Rose pointed out.

Not the smoothest transition...

Having failed to identify a really effective method and after discussing the challenges of correcting the issues created in migrated Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts with the most brilliant PPC consultant I know, we both feel that the fastest, easiest way to get accounts back in order is to create new campaigns totally from scratch.

In spite of Yahoo recommending that advertisers put their ads into categories, those accounts that did not originally have them fared better in the transition.

If you had categories you will probably be better off starting over and then deleting what was migrated. If you do not wish to do this, the only suggestion I have is to download the entire account as a spreadsheet, make your changes, and then upload it again.